Nidderdale Group Practice in context
Nationally the NHS news is not great: today's headlines show satisfaction with NHS at the lowest ever, with particular mention of long waits for GP and hospital appointments and understaffing.
The government has just imposed a new contract on General Practice which is deemed by the BMA to be unacceptable, ignoring all of the major demands that were made, and predictions are of an acceleration in the trend of practice closures. The national direction continues to be towards "General Practice at scale" where increasingly the GP role is to lead and oversee work done by a multi-disciplinary team, and smaller practices merge or close. Examples of this are happening in Harrogate. In some ways we are managing to "buck the trend"- we have increased GP hours and have introduced rotas which promote continuity of care, and our GPs still do home visits. Against expert advice we have managed to maintain three sites full time, with three viable dispensaries despite unfavourable T+C (compared with those for community pharmacies).
We continue to strive to maintain the best of family practice while embracing the opportunities to improve services through "Primary Care Networks". The "additional roles" available at the practice continue to expand, including three First Contact Physiotherapists, several Pharmacists/pharmacy technicians, a Social Prescriber, a Healthy Living/Wellbeing Practitioner, a First Contact Mental Health Worker and various Care Co-ordinators. All of these provide valuable service to our patients, although they are not employed by the practice.
Dispensary Issues
As above, without our dispensaries the practice might not be viable so we encourage patients to support them. We have capacity for more patients to use the vending machine "PS24" at Dacre: this allows medication to be picked up 24/7- please contact reception if you would like to register for this.
Reconfiguration and stock control improvements are still in progress.
Consulting: in person, online, telephone
Online consultations continue to be extremely popular and are a very efficient option for cases which do not require examination- we aim to respond within three working days and the average response time is currently much shorter. Not everyone uses the internet however, and many cases are better suited to face-to-face consulting. We continue to provide Face-to-face and telephone appointments with all our GPs and Nurse Practitioners at all three sites, and although we think we have the balance about right, we are constantly monitoring this and tweaking rotas. The new contract with the Government places more emphasis on online consulting, but what we would like to improve is the wait for a routine face-to-face appointment.
Recruitment
We have had very successful recruiting rounds but are still short-staffed in rec dispensary. We have recently undergone a "Quality Improvement Project" looking at how the practice welcomes and trains newcomers and we hope this will improve retention as well as efficiency and quality of working life.
Doctors
We are delighted to welcome Dr Joanna Stanwell as our latest new GP. Dr Stanwell previously worked as a paediatric surgeon and retrained as a GP locally. We are also looking forward to welcoming back Dr Joanne Walton from maternity leave next month.
New Phone System
We are pleased with the new phone system which allows for patients to be called back rather than having to hang on the 'phone. It is early days and there have been some technical problems at Pateley, but otherwise signs are that the new system is more reliable and functional.